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USS Theodore Roosvelt UFO incidents

USS Theodore Roosevelt underway in the Atlantic Ocean in March 2015
Date	June 2, 2014 – March 10, 2015 (2014-06-02 – 2015-03-10)
Location	East Coast of the United States

The USS Theodore Roosevelt UFO incidents were a series of radar-visual encounters of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) by United States Navy fighter pilots of the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group that occurred between the summer of 2014 and March 2015 along the East Coast of the United States. Videos of the incidents were initially released in 2017 by a company named "To the Stars" and by former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo to shed light on a secretive United States Department of Defense operation to analyze reported UFO sightings, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. In April 2020 the footage was declassified and officially released by the Department of Defense.

The aerial phenomena observed in the videos is characterised as "unidentified" by the Department of Defense. There currently is no explanation or identification for the incidents.

History

In late 2017 and early 2018, a company named "To the Stars" released two infrared video recordings by an F/A-18 Super Hornet from the Roosevelt and a third related to another UFO incident involving USS Nimitz in 2004. The videos were part of a campaign by former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo who said that he wanted to shed light on a secretive Department of Defense operation to analyze reported UFO sightings, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The two videos were reported by The New York Times to have been taken a few weeks apart with the audio of the pair including voices of military personnel who were questioning what they were observing. The Navy confirmed the authenticity of the videos stating only that they depict what they consider to be "unidentified aerial phenomena". Susan Gough, a Pentagon spokeswoman, confirmed that the three videos were made by naval aviators and that they are "part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years." In April 2020, the two videos were declassified and officially released by the Department of Defense, alongside footage from the Nimitz incident.

Five pilots from the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” fighter squadron interviewed by the The New York Times have reported sighting unidentified flying objects "almost daily" while training for a deployment to the Persian Gulf. Three of those pilots have chosen to remain anonymous, while two, Lieutenants Ryan Graves and Danny Accoin, have given interviews and appeared on a History Channel program about UFOs. Radar contacts, infrared detections, and visual sightings by the pilots and weapon systems officers have been reported. According to Accoin the objects had "no distinct wing, no distinct tail, no distinct exhaust plume." One pilot described something "like a sphere encasing a cube". Accoin said that "multiple sensors reading the exact same thing." Graves stated that the objects were showing up at 30,000 feet as well as sea level and could accelerate, slow down and hit hypersonic speeds with manoeuvres "beyond the physical limits of a human crew." The pilots also reported that the objects persisted in the air for long periods of time and would "be out there all day". When one of those sightings was made, “usually we’d just say, ‘we’re seeing one of those damn things again”, stated Graves. Once, pilots reported an object almost collided with two jets prompting the VFA-11 fighter squadron to submit an aviation flight safety report. According to the pilots, the squadron had previously speculated that the sightings could have been a classified drone development program, but the near miss angered the pilots and convinced them that this was a safety issue and not a black project.

UFO skeptic Robert Sheaffer has criticized stories of Navy UFO reports appearing in The New York Times as "crafted by UFO believers to appear neutral and objective when it is anything but". Sheaffer notes that authors Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal have a history of promoting UFOs. Skeptical investigator Benjamin Radford wrote that Kean "has a documented history of championing UFO reports that turned out to be mistakes and hoaxes."

Aftermath and analysis

After the incidents became public, classified congressional hearings were conducted with the goal of understanding and identifying the potential threat to the safety and security of aviators. The Navy has confirmed that, in response to inquiries by members Congress, they have provided a series of briefings by senior naval intelligence officials as well as testimony from "aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety". The contents of those briefings are classified, but Senator Mark Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who attended one of those briefings, released a statement requesting further research into "unexplained interference in the air" that could pose safety concerns for naval pilots. According to Popular Mechanics, "insiders also say" Brigadier General Richard Stapp, Director of the DoD Special Access Program Central Office, testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that "mysterious objects being encountered by the military were not related to secret U.S. technology". President Donald Trump has also been briefed on the issue and has stated "I did have one very brief meeting on it. But people are saying they're seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly."

Following the hearings, the Navy announced it had updated the way pilots were to formally report UFO incidents, in order to encourage pilots to flag disturbances which "have been occurring regularly since 2014." According to Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the deputy Chief of Naval Operations, the new guidance was an update of instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt incidents and stated that: "we don’t know who's doing this, we don't have enough data to track this. The intent of the message to the fleet is to provide updated guidance on reporting procedures for suspected intrusions into our airspace." Regarding the new guidelines, he said that one possible explanation for the increase in reported intrusions could be the rise in availability of unmanned aerial systems such as quadrocopters.

According to astrophysicist Leon Golub, the reports have a number of possible mundane explanations such as "bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight." In a similar vein, physicist Don Lincoln pointed out that while the pilots may have thought they saw what they believed to be an "unidentified flying object", since far more plausible explanations exist, he proposed that "what these pilots were seeing is something with a more ordinary explanation, whether it be an instrumental glitch or some other unexplained artifact." Raytheon has confirmed those videos have been captured by one of their ATFLIR targeting pods mounted on the fighter jets. They stated that "video images are not definitive proof that the jet pilots were chasing an actual UFO." Steve Cummings, vice president of Technology Development and Execution, stated that "To really be sure, we would need the raw data", "visual displays alone are not the best evidence" and that one way to exclude any anomaly would be to observe "the same target, behaving the same way on multiple sensors."

In popular culture

• The History Channel featured the incident in the 2019 television show Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation with interviews of Lt. Graves and Accoin.

See also

• Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program
• USS Nimitz UFO incident

References

1. ^ Cooper, Helene; Blumenthal, Ralph; Kean, Leslie (2019-05-26). "'Wow, What Is That?' Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-02-24.
2. ^ McMillan, Tim (2020-01-17). "The Tale of the Tape: The Long, Bizarre Saga of the Navy's UFO Video". Popular Mechanics. Retrieved 2020-02-24.
3. Bender, Bryan. "The Pentagon's Secret Search for UFOs". POLITICO Magazine. Retrieved 2020-05-01.
4. Warrick, Joby (2017-12-16). "Head of Pentagon's secret 'UFO' office sought to make evidence public". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2020-05-01.
5. Clinton, Christopher Mellon Christopher Mellon served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the; investor, George W. Bush administrations He is a private equity; Arts, an adviser to the To the Stars Academy for; Science. "Perspective | The military keeps encountering UFOs. Why doesn't the Pentagon care?". Washington Post. Retrieved 2020-05-01.
6. ^ "Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Na". U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE. Retrieved 2020-05-01.
7. April 2020, Mindy Weisberger 28. "'UFO' videos declassified by US Navy". Space.com. Retrieved 2020-05-04.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
8. Cooper, Helene; Blumenthal, Ralph; Kean, Leslie (December 16, 2017). "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program". The New York Times. Retrieved December 17, 2017.
9. Bender, Bryan (December 16, 2017). "The Pentagon's Secret Search for UFOs". Politico. Retrieved December 17, 2017.
10. Warrick, Joby (December 16, 2017). "Head of Pentagon's secret 'UFO' office sought to make evidence public". The Washington Post. Retrieved December 21, 2017.
11. Mellon, Christopher (March 9, 2018). "The military keeps encountering UFOs. Why doesn't the Pentagon care?". The Washington Post. Retrieved March 12, 2018.
12. ^ Epstein, Kayla (2019-09-18). "Those UFO Videos are Real, the Navy Says, but Please Stop Saying 'UFO'". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2019-09-19. Retrieved 2020-02-25.
13. "Navy Confirms Existence of 'Unidentified' Flying Objects Seen in Leaked Footage". Time. Retrieved 2020-02-25.
14. "Yep, those are UFOs, Navy says about 3 videos of strange sightings". NBC News. Retrieved 2020-02-25.
15. Taylor, Derrick Bryson (2019-09-26). "How Blink-182's Tom DeLonge Became a U.F.O. Researcher". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-03-27.
16. "Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos", Department of Defense. Retrieved April 27, 2020.
17. ^ May 2019, Mindy Weisberger 29. "'Fleet of UFOs' Followed US Aircraft, Navy Pilot Says". livescience.com. Retrieved 2020-04-26.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
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19. Sheaffer, Robert. "The Pentagon's UFOs, How a Multimedia Entertainment Company created a UFO news story". Skeptic Magazine, Vol. 24, Issue 3. Skeptic Magazine. Retrieved 24 March 2020.
20. Radford, Benjamin. "Newly Revealed Secret DoD 'UFO' Project Less Than Meets the Eye". Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, Vol. 42, No. 2. Commitee for Skeptical Inquiry.
21. ^ Bender, Bryan (2019-06-19). "Senators get classified briefing on UFO sightings". POLITICO. Retrieved 2020-02-24.
22. "Congress receive classified briefing on 'UFO encounters with US navy'". The Independent. 2019-06-20. Retrieved 2020-02-24.
23. ^ McMillan, Tim (2020-02-14). "Inside the Pentagon's Secret UFO Program". Popular Mechanics. Retrieved 2020-02-25.
24. Bender, Bryan. "U.S. Navy drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs". POLITICO. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
25. Choi, Matthew (2019-06-15). "Trump says he was briefed on Navy sightings of UFOs". POLITICO. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
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27. Lincoln, Don (June 21, 2019). "Why pilots are seeing UFOs". CNN. Retrieved 24 March 2020.
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29. Janos, Adam. "Why Have There Been So Many UFO Sightings near Nuclear Facilities?". HISTORY. Retrieved 2020-02-24.

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